From the Magazine

Stealth Warriors

The most effective counterterrorism force in the world is Israel’s Sayeret Matkal—“the Unit.” A highly secretive special-operations brigade, it has taken on mythic status with swift, surgical victories in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and, perhaps most famously, Entebbe, Uganda, where its commandos freed 103 Jewish hostages after a 1976 hijacking. Probing the Unit’s shadowy history, Rich Cohen reveals the leaders it has forged (including Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu), the methods by which it hunted down the members of Black September, and the brutal lessons it can teach the U.S.

Beirut, Lebanon, 1973. A few miles off the coast, the sea turned glassy, and the men in the boats, among them six Israeli commandos disguised as tourists—three of them dressed as women—caught sight of Beirut, with its graceful boulevards and its grand hotels.

The soldiers ditched their dinghies and crossed the empty beach to where agents from the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, were waiting for them in three cars. The commandos split up into groups. On their way through the city, they were disguised as couples out for an evening ride in the hills.

At a stoplight, Ehud Barak, 31 years old, a future prime minister of Israel, dressed, in a wig and lipstick, as a sassy brunette, smiled at the man in the next car. The light changed and off the man drove. Each of the commandos knew the route by heart, a maze of roads that led through the city to the target: a building on the outskirts, home of two of the leaders of Black September, a splinter group of the P.L.O. that, a few months earlier, at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, had kidnapped several members of the Israeli Olympic team; 11 were killed. In the aftermath of this massacre, Golda Meir, the country’s grandmotherly, Wisconsin-raised prime minister, ordered the military to hunt down the members of Black September—a mission undertaken as a matter of deterrence and as a statement of resolve. In those weeks of planning, much of the mission was turned over to Sayeret Matkal, a highly classified special-ops outfit, which is known as “the Unit.”

Since its inception in 1957, the Unit, which consists of about 200 full-time commandos and hundreds more reserves, has grown into perhaps the most effective counterterrorism force in the world. In Israel, and in military circles, it has become a myth, a rumor of a rumor, a secret fraternity of soldiers who, in their spartan, never-ending war on terrorism, strike as if out of nowhere and have scored dozens of victories—in Egypt and in Lebanon and in Jordan and, perhaps most famously, at Entebbe, an airport in Idi Amin’s Uganda, in sub-Saharan Africa, where, in 1976, 106 Air France passengers were being held hostage. Having examined passports and searched out telltale last names, the Entebbe hijackers moved the Jewish passengers to an old terminal building and released the rest—a clarifying moment that echoed the Nazi selections of World War II, wherein the concentration-camp Jews were chosen to live or die. For Israelis, it was as if history were giving them a second chance, and all at once the remoteness of the Entebbe airport, which at more than 2,000 miles from Israel had seemed an improbable site to attempt a commando rescue, was now seen as conducive to a surprise raid. The commandos were airlifted in with Land Rovers and a Mercedes-Benz. Disguised as members of Amin’s own army, they stormed the building and killed the terrorists, saving all but three of the hostages.

Because the Unit embodies so much of the national ethos, it has served as a training ground for the most powerful figures in Israel. Ehud Barak put in his time with the Unit, as did another future prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Netanyahu’s big brother, Jonathan Netanyahu, who was the only Israeli soldier killed at Entebbe, as well as a vast collection of future generals and intelligence officers and national leaders and heroes. Whereas other Israeli commando units exist within the military hierarchy, the leader of Sayeret Matkal, which operates from a secret base deep in the Negev Desert—on maps the entire area is blacked out—reports directly to the chief of staff and with him designs missions and otherwise responds to attacks.

When facing terrorism, especially in the wake of awful events, there is a tendency to despair, to see in the battle a problem without a solution. The functioning of the Unit is therefore more than merely a practical solution; it is a philosophical response. The simple act of resistance is in itself a key victory over terrorism.

Speaking of their time in the Unit, most veterans insist that their names not be used, and sometimes even request that you tell no one of the meeting—“This never happened”—or else that you ask nothing specific. Secrecy is a habit of their lives under arms, and so you meet them in nondescript locations—a coffee shop in Netanya, a rough Mediterranean city of Russian immigrants, or a hotel lobby in Tiberias, an ancient town on the Sea of Galilee—where they are unlikely to run into friends or colleagues. Many of them are still in the military, while others work for security companies or software concerns, or in politics. Each discussion begins with a list of qualifications. If you stray, the conversation shuts off like a light. And yet, from these conversations, and from a precious few memoirs and history books, most of them in Hebrew, a picture emerges—the missions and sprees of an elite team of soldiers.

Twice a year the officers throw a party, the winter bash dedicated to eating (“A party based on meat,” says Dov Tamari, a former commander of the Unit. “We eat lambs and cows, and we eat lots of chickens”) and the summer bash dedicated to drinking. At one of these affairs, an officer named Uzi Yairi, who could not hold his liquor, insisted on drinking from his own whiskey bottle, which, as discovered by a soldier sneaking a swig, was filled with tea—a finding that led to outrage, then admiration: here was another commando thinking his way past his weakness. In 1975, Yairi was killed storming the Savoy Hotel in Tel Aviv, where terrorists had taken a group of hostages.

Some veterans are more open, such as Ron Levi, who was a commando in the Unit and later returned as its psychologist, or Sammy Nachmias, who was with the Unit in its early years and went on to a long career in intelligence, or Dalia Rabin-Pelossof, Israel’s deputy minister of defense (and the daughter of former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin) who served as the secretary of the Unit (“All I did was worry about the boys and eat cake and gain weight”). But they speak in specifics only up to a point—1984, say, when the commandos stormed a hijacked bus in Gaza—beyond which a shadow of secrecy descends.

With agents in the field, even a fact that seems trivial can lead to death and ruin. And yet, there are hints and rumors of what the boys have been up to. There have been suggestions that, after the Gulf War, when it was clear America would not finish the job, officers in the Unit sketched a plan—it can still be put into action—to kill Saddam Hussein; or that the Unit has been involved in the hunt for militant Palestinians, those Israel has deemed responsible for terrorist attacks, who have been tracked down and killed with such chilling precision.

Unlike American commando units, which tend to rely on brute strength, stamina, and sophisticated weaponry, the Unit operates in a sort of twilight realm between the regular army and the intelligence services—elite soldiers trained in the brutal language of the region, a language Americans will now have to learn. An Israeli commando, as opposed to someone like former special-ops soldier Jesse “the Body” Ventura, is often slight and inconspicuous and, if necessary, can blend in with the local population, operate like a spy, then strike like a soldier. “The Israel special forces think outside the box,” says Dr. Magnus Ranstorp of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. “In all kinds of ways, they push the envelope. For example, most soldiers, if they come under fire, immediately look for cover. The Israelis don’t look for cover. They stay put, identify the source of the fire, and take it out.”

In theory, Sayeret Matkal is akin to such outfits as America’s Green Berets, U.S. Army Rangers, or Delta Force, or the British S.A.S. However, since it has never known a season of peace, and since it has been forced to evolve through a bloody process of trial and error, the Unit has reached an unmatched level of precision. It excels at the military art of “close work,” the volatile mix of espionage and pre-emptive strikes that American officials have been reluctant to engage in—a reluctance to work with sleazy foreign agents and underworld turncoats that, in the end, has been the luxury of a nation without formidable enemies, a nation at peace. It is a luxury that, along with our electric drink stirrers and mink hangers, has gone quickly out of style. America must now learn some of the lessons perfected long ago by the Israelis—the art of working the gaps, fighting, by stealth and ingenuity, beyond the stately rules of U.N. committees.

The United States, which all at once finds itself in this murky nowhere, has traditionally operated, quite naturally, with a big-country mentality. For example, while hunting a terrorist, Rangers might establish a perimeter and roar in with dozens of soldiers descending by rope from Black Hawk helicopters—a strategy that proved disastrous in Somalia. The Israeli commandos fight like partisans, in small numbers, often in disguise, rising, attacking, fading away. “On many missions, if a single shot is fired, we have failed,” says one veteran member of the Unit. “A shot fired is just a way of telling the enemy, ‘Here we are! Come kill us!’”

A successful mission goes off in secrecy, the enemy realizing it has been bested only when the battle is over. It is a gambling style of lightning raids that depends on surprise, planning, and skill; it is a style that has grown up with the challenges of terrorism, an endless war without borders or clear targets or clear ends; and it is a style that now, and in the coming decade, offers the best model for the American military. “Special ops is a scalpel,” says Major Andy Messing, who spent most of his career with the U.S. Special Forces. “And the scalpel is almost always better than the sledgehammer. If you are a kid killing ants, you want to use the magnifying glass. Well, the magnifying glass is Special Forces. The cruise missile is the sledgehammer—it destroys the driveway, and it doesn’t even kill the ants.”

By 1972, when the Israeli athletes were killed at Munich, the Unit was emerging as the force behind the region’s most dramatic headlines. It was there in Beirut, when, in response to cross-border attacks, 14 Lebanese planes were blown up on the runway at the international airport; in Tunis, Tunisia, when Abu Jihad, the P.L.O. military leader responsible for the deaths of dozens of Israelis, was killed in his home; and in southern Lebanon, when a handful of Syrian officers were captured and then traded for Israeli pilots being held in Damascus. One day, at a meeting of his officers, Ehud Barak, who was then commanding the Unit, passed around three photos—grainy shots showing Arabs in their middle years. Those at the meeting were certain that these men were involved in the killings at Munich. The Mossad had tracked them to Beirut, where two of them were living in the same building; the third was living just across the street. The Mossad had also come up with blueprints of each building, which Barak spread out in front of his officers.

Before a mission, the leaders of the Unit suggest and debate dozens of strategies; when a course is agreed upon, they go to work on logistics, practicing on a model of the target, counting out the steps. In planning operations, the Unit, which has its own budget and its own runway, is given incredible freedom, needing only a final go-ahead from the top leaders of the country. In one instance, when an official questioned the effectiveness of Sayeret Matkal, members of the Unit quickly drew up an operation, then kidnapped and held senior officers from the general staff, making their case in a powerful way.

In the days leading up to the raid on Black September, the commandos drilled on a housing development in Tel Aviv. In April 1973, the elite team, which, as mentioned, included Ehud Barak disguised as a brunette and also Amiram Levine, later a deputy head of the Mossad, disguised as a blonde, was taken by ship to within a few miles of Lebanon. From there, the commandos climbed into Zodiacs, rubber dinghies with outboard engines; they kicked the engines into gear and roared off toward the coast. That night, a group of Israeli paratroopers were also to destroy a weapons plant in the coastal city of Tyre as another group destroyed the six-story headquarters of George Habash, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which pioneered modern skyjacking. This was to be the kind of multi-front operation that gives the terrorists a sense of a war coming into their own home.

Within a few hundred yards of the beach, commandos cut the engines, and the elite team was rowed to shore. Once they were on land, three Mossad cars drove them through the city, and they were dropped a few blocks from the target. On the street, the commandos, disguised as couples, walked right by a Lebanese policeman. Barak and Levine stood guard while three teams went into the buildings. In front of each apartment door, the teams placed an explosive. A signal was given, and each team set off its charge. Muki Betser, a lanky, dark-haired officer who led one of the teams, followed his blast through the doorway. He ran down the hall toward the bedroom. He knew the way from the blueprints. The bedroom door opened, and Betser recognized a face from the photographs. The door slammed, but Betser fired his machine gun. He kicked open the door. The man inside was dead.

From upstairs, Betser could hear the rat-a-tat of gunfire. He ran outside. The lookouts had been spotted by a patrol. Betser could see Barak and Levine in their wigs, firing their Uzis. Several Lebanese soldiers were killed.

The Mossad showed up with the cars, and the men sped downhill to the beach. They could hear several blasts as the paratroopers hit the headquarters of the Popular Front. Three leaders of Black September were killed that night. The next morning, the Beirut newspapers reported an attack by “beautiful she-devils, a blonde and a brunette, who fought off the police and the army like dervishes with machine guns.”

In the years since, with one exception, all of those suspected of taking part in the Munich massacre have been hunted down and killed. There has never been any footage of these attacks, and the Israelis have never taken credit. They don’t need to. The last survivor is hiding in Africa, spared so he can tell the story.

Israel’s battle with terrorism began in the 50s in the form of border raids launched from Egypt and Jordan. From the beginning, the Israelis, conditioned by the legacy of the Holocaust, in which, in the popular imagination, the Jews had reacted passively in the face of annihilation, vowed to retaliate against any attack. Instead of merely defending themselves, the Israelis would launch counterstrikes, deep thrusts into enemy territory. The Israelis had realized that if a terrorist is determined to attack the country, especially if he is willing to lose his own life, beyond a certain point there is little that can be done. The army must instead respond in a way that influences the terrorist’s behavior, that makes his crimes costly, so costly, in fact, that the price outweighs the rewards. “Israelis understand this situation better than we do,” said Major General Bob Patterson, who until 1989 was a commander of the United States Air Force Special Operations Command and who has gone on maneuvers with the Israeli commandos. “Americans are poker players. If we don’t like the hand, we just fold. The Israelis know the game is chess—if they can’t beat it, at least they can control it.”

From its beginning, a big part of the Zionist project was self-defense—for the first time in thousands of years, Jews would fight in their own armies. It all started with the Haganah, an underground force which protected settlements in the Galilee. Within the Haganah was the Palmach, an elite force that to this day serves as a model for Israeli soldiers. Poorly supplied and outnumbered, the Palmach, which consisted largely of visionary Jews from Poland and Russia, developed a style that depended on speed and mobility, on outthinking the enemy. One of its leaders was Yitzhak Rabin, the future prime minister, who, in the mid-40s, led the famous raid on Atlit, a British internment camp where hundreds of Jewish refugees were being held.

After Israel won its independence in 1948, this guerrilla tradition was carried on, most notably by Unit 101, a famed outfit, the mere mention of which, like Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, evokes a freewheeling past. The 101 was led by a young officer named Ariel Sharon, now the prime minister but then just a cannonball of a kid who stirred his men into fierce loyalty. For the 101, the Sinai Desert, with its tremendous vacancies and hard skies, was like the sea. They crossed it again and again. In retaliation for a terrorist attack, the 101 blew up more than 40 houses in Jordan, killing 69 people who Sharon mistakenly thought had cleared out—a tragedy that haunts him and is one of the escapades that has branded him a brutal adventurer.

In the early days of Sayeret Matkal, Avraham Arnan, who first conceived of the Unit—it was to gather intelligence in foreign countries, and for this reason many of its soldiers were Sephardic Jews who spoke Arabic and could pass as Arabs—used to tell his men, “The Palmach is gone and so is the 101. Now it is only us. We are the tip of Israel’s spear.” Arnan wanted his men to be more than a military brigade. He wanted them to be friends and brothers, a secret elite, the hidden righteous, like the 36, the holy few who, in the Talmud, unknown to the public and even to themselves, save the world from destruction. Unit members were not recruited so much as discovered, picked out from posts across the military for their intelligence or dedication or skill. There are two basic types in the Unit: little guys like Ehud Barak, who have some special talent —Barak can pick any lock in the world in about eight seconds—or big guys like Benjamin Netanyahu, who are the packhorses of the troop. Within the Unit, there is an almost standard-style soldier: first-generation Israelis who spent their youth on farms in the North, blistered by work and filled with ideology, the first batch of that new-model Jew the founders of the nation had vowed to build from the ashes of the old world. These men are dark and handsome, or short and squat, or wide-open and blond, or green-eyed, or excitable, or cool, but all of them, no matter what else, have in their eyes the same grim, calculating gaze—to them, there is no problem without a solution.

For Israel, the face of modern terrorism emerged only in the mid-70s, after the Six- Day War and the Yom Kippur War, in which Israel defeated all of its enemies; terrorism, the refuge of a defeated faction, took over where conventional war had failed. In those years, Yasser Arafat and other leaders of the P.L.O. believed that the Jews could be driven away by fear. To them, the Israelis, for all their military strength, suffered a fatal flaw—an almost hysterical aversion to casualties. In Israel, as in America, democratic societies that hinge on the individual, a tremendous value is placed on the life of even the lowliest soldier. Arafat believed that if he killed enough Israelis they would soon give up and go home—to which home, he did not say. Between 1969 and 1985, the P.L.O. was involved in 30 hijackings and more than 8,000 acts of terrorism. “In hand-to-hand combat, face-to-face, [the Israelis] are not even soldiers,” Arafat said in 1972. “They show no courage. They are too afraid of dying.”

With the appearance of this new terrorism, the Unit shifted its mission. Instead of merely gathering intelligence, it would now act on it. The Israelis decided to answer such attacks not with wide-scale war but with a series of operations, strikes, and counterstrikes that would keep terrorists off-balance and too busy protecting themselves to launch missions inside of Israel. The commandos turned even non-action into a kind of action, a pause in which the enemy wonders what comes next, a silence filled with phantoms. Those first operations tended to be hit-and-run: identify a target, take it out, get back to base. In the late 60s, Israeli soldiers, who in the Six-Day War had conquered the east bank of the Suez Canal, were under constant fire from Green Island, a big rock in the waterway which the Egyptians had fortified with barbed wire, cement walls, and cannons. It was said to be impregnable. On a night in July ‘69, the Unit outfitted 20 commandos in wet suits and air tanks and sent them, linked by rope, with guns and grenades, into the water of the canal. About an hour later, the soldiers, who had practiced the operation on a Crusader fortress, emerged at the base of the island, dropped their tanks, scaled the walls, and laid siege. After a rambling firefight, the Unit mined the island with bombs and evacuated.

In 1972 the Unit took its first crack at a skyjacking. Members of the Popular Front of the P.L.O. had taken over a Sabena airliner and brought it to Tel Aviv, where, filled with passengers, it sat for hours. The leaders of the Unit, who can draw up a plan on the fly and never use the same plan twice, sent a handful of commandos onto the runway disguised as mechanics. As the airplane taxied in for fuel, the commandos stormed it, attacking the terrorists, capturing two of them and killing two others, and freeing all but one of the passengers. There is a picture of Ehud Barak taken a few minutes after the raid. He looks comical dressed in his white coveralls, his shoulders slumped and his face showing an expression I have seen on the faces of boxers at the end of a hard fight. This rescue, the first such operation in history, became a model around the world. Along with several other rescues, many of them staged by the Unit, it so raised the risks for terrorists that it helped lead to the nearly 20-year decline in skyjacking that ended this past September.

The soldiers in Sayeret Matkal, about 200 full-time commandos, are scattered among several divisions, operating in groups of no more than 15 or 20. In the mathematics of modern warfare, where the enemy vanishes into the circuits of our own technology, such teams are the future of battle—a throwback to the age of knights, when a select few carried with them the hopes of civilization. At any time, two of these divisions may be in the field while a third is back at base in case of emergency. On leave, soldiers have to give a contact number and also call into base every few hours to make sure nothing has developed. These men serve for about five years and then continue on in the reserves, on duty for 100 days a year and reporting in times of crisis. Such veterans also act as recruiters and gatekeepers, as protectors of the legacy. Twice a year, many of them head to a testing camp, where thousands of 18-year-olds run drills, including a grueling sprint up a vast dune called “the natural disaster,” as old-timers search out intangibles. “We don’t look for the big guy but the little guy you hardly even notice first time around,” a member of the Unit told me. “The guy who helps his team, or thinks up some clever way around some old problem.” Recruits who make it through a week of drills—there are sprints and tests and stretcher carries and basketball games and nights without sleep, veterans shouting and hazing and seeing who holds up, and blown tempers and brawls—meet with the leader of the Unit. One commander used to ask each kid where he was from and then, if he was from, say, Safed, a beautiful old town in the hills above Galilee, the commander would say, “You are at the intersection of Zvi Levanon and Beit Yosef looking northeast—what do you see?” He was testing astuteness and visual memory, but he was also saying something about himself and the soldiers in his outfit. Out of the thousands, a dozen or so are selected and sent to the paratroopers, where they go through six months of basic training, sleeping three hours a night, learning how to handle weapons, learning, through endless hikes, every hill and dale of the Negev. From there, they are sent to a training base hidden in the desert, where, in squads of 10 or 12, they drill with pistols and machine guns; there is a course in counterterrorism, in which recruits learn to storm planes, rescue hostages, diffuse bombs, sidestep booby traps, and go in disguise. In drills, each recruit takes a different role—marksman, reserve, monkie, the man who, rappelling from a roof, busts through a window. There are also lessons in hand-to-hand combat, urban warfare, and night fighting, an Israeli specialty. In these months, the soldier takes on the look of a commando, outfitting himself with the gear that suits his skills. A typical commando carries a machine gun, extra magazines, a pistol, a compass, and a knife holstered to his ankle. At the insistence of soldiers in the Unit, Israeli engineers actually invented a new kind of machine gun, an Uzi with a collapsible handle that, even on the run, discharges tremendously accurate bursts of fire.

At some point, each of the recruits is kidnapped by veterans, who, dressed as terrorists and speaking Arabic, hustle the kid off to a hut in the desert, where he is interrogated—the officers need to know who will break. Most important are those months spent learning to navigate, to find your way across stretches of alien terrain. There is night navigation on the Golan Heights, with its snowy peaks and its crystal views of the Galilee, and there are solo hikes in the Negev, with its craters and its dunes. In 1988, a recruit was killed solo-navigating the Ramon Crater. If you get lost or break a leg on solo navigation, there is no one to help you. For this reason, it is a great tradition of the Unit to wander the wilderness of Joseph and Jesus. All the while, the commandos are filled with a sense of mission: for the most part, they will live in the details, but they are never to lose sight of the broader struggle, the fight for Israel and also a distinct way of life. Seasons change, nations rise and fall, but it is always the same fight; it is Galileo in the well of the Inquisition, and Churchill on the BBC during the Blitz warning of a new dark age made more sinister by the lights of perverted science. “This is a war of survival and the Israelis know it,” said Victor Davis Hanson, the author of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power. “They have confidence in their mission—find the enemy, kill the enemy. That saves Israeli lives. As a result, they are a moral force and that is what gives them such tremendous strength.”

Training ends with a four-day ramble in the desert along a course that leads to Masada, the hilltop fortress where, 2,000 years ago, the Zealots, the last holdouts of ancient Judea, took a final stand against the Roman legions camped below. The location of the fortress was lost until, about 150 years ago, an archaeologist stumbled across it—the storehouses, the ruined baths, the public rooms. The soldier makes his climb at sundown, each switchback affording a glance at the steamy stillness of the Dead Sea. The soldier is greeted at the top by cheering veterans of the Unit and by the chief of staff, who arrives by helicopter, the big bird kicking up a shower of dust. The old man pins on the insignia. It has taken two years, but the recruit is now a full member of the secret brotherhood.